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Numb Nuts: Newspapers Are Stupid

By Roy Peter Clark

I can't imagine what George Carlin is thinking today as he laughs down at us from heaven or up at us from heck. Oh, yeah, I used heck so as not to offend the readers of this Web site, especially the children who might stumble upon this post on their way to Romenesko.

I guess old Carlin didn't know that nuts was one of those words you can't say on television or put in a newspaper. Gosh (euphemism for God), if you put nuts in the paper, people, especially young people, might stop reading it.

I hope by now you get my drift. I agree wholeheartedly with Howard Kurtz that newspapers should have quoted Jesse Jackson in full when he whispered this about Barack Obama on a Fox open microphone:

"See Barack been, um, talking down to black people on this faith based. I wanna cut his nuts off. Barack, he's been talking down to black people."

When the controversy broke, I wondered, like most other folks, what Jackson said that was so offensive it could not be printed in the newspaper. In the early reports, I read phrases such as "crude remark" about doing something to Obama, or emasculate, and then finally castrate.

Wow, I thought, castrate.

I cannot speak for other men, but, to me, castrate is one of the worst words in the English language.  It conjures everything from old cruel Italian efforts to preserve angelic voices in choir boys, to suggested punishments for child abusers, to the desires of scorned women like Lorena Bobbitt, to, most horrific, the punishment imposed by some slaveholders against uppity or rebellious slaves.

It is in that context that Jackson's remarks are most remarkable: that he would not say that he'd like to knock down that kid a peg or two, or slap that arrogant grin off his face, or even kick his skinny ass to kingdom come. Instead, Jackson chose to appropriate the slaveholder's horrific threat against another black man. In offensive parlance I've learned from my African-American colleagues, it was as if Jackson were a plantation owner accusing Obama of being a "house nigger," a privileged black man who spoke down to other black people.

But such argument is impossible UNLESS WE KNOW EXACTLY WHAT JACKSON SAID.

I'll take my argument one step forward: By veiling Jackson's actual words, the news media may have created the impression that he said something worse. To say that you'd like to cut someone's nuts off is, among other things, what language experts call a dysphemism, a word or phrase that is harsher than your true meaning and intent. If I'm wrong about that, let's make sure we keep Jackson away from the cutlery. Dysphemisms often convey a sense that the speaker is exaggerating for effect.

Castrate is meant to serve as a euphemism for nut cutting, the way the most proper prefer urinate to piss. As in: "That Jesse Jackson must have been really urinated off at Barack Obama to say such a thing." Alas, castrate contains none of the mitigating slang outrageousness of nuts, which means the news media managed to turn a euphemism into a dysphemism, a colossal act of linguistic incompetence. Shame. 

Full post as published by Writing Tools on July 15, 2008 (boomark / email).